The Great Gatsby

A lavish version of the Fitzgerald classic that lacks the magic of the novel
The thing to remember is that this is a Baz Luhrmann movie and taken purely on those terms is very enjoyable. Whether it’s also an accurate and sensitive representation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is another matter. I don’t think it is – not by a long way.

But then I don’t think the book is filmable and, in his heart, I suspect even Luhrmann must realise that he’s now the fifth director to discover that.

The problem is not the story: at its simplest it’s merely a tale of love found, lost, found again, then lost once more and that’s easy enough to film. But the beauty of The Great Gatsby lies not in its plot but in the cleverness and subtlety of the writing, in what is implicit as well as explicit, and that’s pretty well impossible to show on screen.

Besides, subtlety is not exactly Luhrmann’s strong point. What he likes, as he showed with Moulin Rouge, is big, loud, spectacular and what he gives us here is almost a caricature of the wild decadence of the Jazz Age. Gatsby’s new-money mansion on Long Island looks like something out of Disneyland and the old money pile across the water where his love, Daisy Buchanan, lives with her wealthy, boorish and adulterous husband Tom, is hardly less ostentatious.

Then, too, the parties Gatsby throws to attract Daisy’s attention are like no parties there have ever been – wilder, noisier, with a cast of hundreds. It’s all just too big – not for Luhrmann, perhaps, but certainly for Fitzgerald.

As Gatsby, the dirt-poor boy who became rich through bootlegging and financial scams and reinvented himself as an aristocrat to win back the girl he had loved and lost five years earlier, Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty good. I could believe in him as I could in Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Daisy’s cousin and the story’s narrator, who reintroduces Gatsby to her.

But for once, the talented Carey Mulligan, as Daisy, is disappointing. Not her fault but that of the screenplay, which gives her too little opportunity to show why Gatsby was so obsessively and fatally fascinated by her.

The film, done in big, broad strokes, concerns itself almost exclusively with that obsession. But to be realised fully on screen, The Great Gatsby needs an artist with a finer brush.

Fitzgerald used his story to illustrate a much bigger picture – that of a hedonistic, post-war society given over to pleasure, greed, the desire for wealth and status. What he shows us is the American Dream and its flipside but the film uses all that merely as a backdrop.

On the other hand this is a movie, not a novel and, never mind its origins, you have to ask yourself: Does it work purely as a movie? Well, yes, it does. It has all the lavish, spectacular things that Luhrmann does extremely well. And especially if you’ve never read the book, you won’t mind too much that it kind of loses what Fitzgerald was trying to say.